City's Top Swimmer Faced Obstacles Beyond Pool

Coach Harry Bellucci hoped for the best but steeled himself for heartbreak.

Twenty-five yards ahead stood his swimmer, the 19-year-old senior built like a boxer, preparing to mount the starting block for the biggest race of his life.

Domingo Galarza was the top Hartford swimmer to qualify for the state Class L swimming championship at Wesleyan University this year. He swam the 50-yard freestyle, a power sprint, but his favorite was the butterfly, the most grueling of the four strokes.

The fly was new to Galarza when he joined the Hartford Public High School swim team as a sophomore in late 2009, shortly after he entered the school's Law and Government Academy by way of the Manson Youth Institution, the high-security juvenile correctional facility in Cheshire.

Galarza's roughness smoothed over with toil and time. He became the swim captain; a summer lifeguard for the city of Hartford; and a gentleman beloved by teachers who graduated Friday with the Class of 2012.

Galarza is headed to Johnson & Wales University in Providence this fall as one of about 550 students committed to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families who attend college with the state's financial support of more than $5 million a year.

"Domingo's success is not determined by a stopwatch," Bellucci said. "I just want him to be happy."

But on the night of the state meet, with his foster dad in the stands and Bellucci on edge, Galarza had one last chance to break the school's 100 butterfly record, set in 1989.

'Unfocused Anger'

"Scrappy, like a barn cat," Principal Adam Johnson said.

"He had no punctuation, no capitalization," said Thomas Baldino, an English as a second language teacher at Hartford High. "He had no concept of a paragraph."

"He came in a third of the way into the year, right after Thanksgiving, into geometry class," said Vicki Kuziak, who would eventually teach Galarza precalculus. "I still remember — 'Where did you come from, Domingo?'"

"'I came out of jail,'" Galarza said he told her. "Just like that, straight up."

Galarza's troubles started early; his childhood a haze of dysfunction. There are memories of moving from Puerto Rico to a New York shelter, living there until child protection officials removed him and his five siblings from their mother's custody when he was 5. He grew up angry with a foster family, forced, he said, to take medication through his elementary years.

His mother regained custody when Galarza was around 10. Back in Puerto Rico, off the meds, a cousin taught the boy to swim by pushing him into the deep end. As a 15-year-old, after Galarza's father died of a stroke, he moved to his sister's home in Hartford, he said. Eight relatives lived in a crowded apartment.

The trip to Manson came in summer '09. No one was injured in the family scuffle, but it happened about a month after he was caught with brass knuckles at Weaver High School late in his freshman year, Galarza and school officials said.

The arrest for carrying a weapon landed him in anger management. After the family fight, Galarza said, he cut off his court-ordered ankle bracelet and waited for the cops to take him away.

Galarza told his public defender he would rather enter the Connecticut foster system than return to his family's chaos after the two-month Manson stint. Almost 17, the sophomore was freed to a new home and school.

Bellucci, a physical education teacher at Hartford High, pulled Galarza aside that fall. The veteran coach noticed his strength in the pool, but also the "unfocused anger," as assistant coach Ryan Barnicle would later describe it.

"You're here now, and nobody knows who you are, or what happened to you before you came here," Bellucci told him.

"'What matters is what you do now,'" Galarza remembered him saying. "That stuck with me."

But teenagers? They can be negotiated with, the 55-year-old said. His motto: "You don't earn my respect and trust in this house, you only lose it."

Caban-Hernandez lived alone in New Haven until 2006, when he fell in love with an old house on the market in south Hartford. Within a week, he had a contract on the home. Suddenly, Caban-Hernandez had nine rooms all to himself.

His car sputtered dead and so he bought a sport utility vehicle to haul his belongings.

"It just so happened that I became a foster dad," he said, "and my rooms are now rooms for the boys, and my Rav4 always has kids in it."